Year of the Rattigan

A round up of Rattigan plays to come in 2011

Rattigan will be inescapable this year – and it’s not just the familiar plays. The Jermyn Street Theatre is poised to unveil the coup of a Rattigan “premiere”. Less Than Kind is the never-seen precursor to Love in Idleness, a rarely revived 1944 hit which the author later regarded almost as a travesty of the earlier unperformed script.

According to director Adrian Brown, the original draft tilted the play’s balance in favour of its malcontent hero’s idealism over the pragmatic individualism of his mother’s new partner, a wealthy wartime Cabinet minister. The world will finally get to see this Hamlet-inspired drama as “Rattigan would have liked to have seen it”, or so Brown, 78, claims.

That’s just the start. In Leeds next month the West Yorkshire Playhouse will stage The Deep Blue Sea (1952). Those who can’t catch it can always hang on for Terence Davies’s keenly awaited film version later in the year: Rachel Weisz stars as the heroine Hester Collyer opposite Tom Hiddleston as the unequally matched pilot she has jettisoned her husband (Simon Russell Beale) and equilibrium for.

In March, Thea Sharrock, who brilliantly got After the Dance back on its feet in London for the first time in 70 years last summer, moves down the road from the National to the Old Vic to attempt similar marvels with Rattigan’s final play, Cause Celebre (1977).

If you’re over Northampton way, an early Seventies piece – In Praise of Love – will once more be performed, at the Royal & Derngate in April. Those who want to sample Rattigan’s manifold screenwriting efforts can seek out a dedicated season at the BFI that month, too, while those tantalised by manuscripts and other archival treasures will have a field-day at the British Library, again from April. The air-waves will resound to sundry BBC radio productions.

Oh yes, and Chichester Festival Theatre is lining up an as-yet-undisclosed hoard of goodies in the summer, which just about brings us as far as the anniversary itself - generally but not exclusively considered to be June 10, owing to the bizarre fact that Rattigan’s birth announcement in the Times specified the ninth.